"Fucking bastard."
They had to kill a couple of hours before meeting Kilty. Leslie used the time to mope and smoke, looking wistfully out of windows and periodically locking herself in the toilet to cry. Maureen saw her glaring at the phone a couple of times, as if it were a direct line to Cammy.
Chapter 37
They were sitting side by side like the three wise monkeys, watching the door and not knowing what to do. They had been there for a while and the cold stone step was numbing Maureen's bum. Across the square the Park Circus Health Club was busy. Punters arrived and left. They were middle-aged men, out for their Sunday-night fuck. Mostly they were alone but a couple of twosomes arrived, smiling hard as they jogged up to the door. A fat man with thin legs arrived in a car and paused on the top step before pressing the bell, wringing his hands with his elbows bowed to the sides.
"What's he doing?" asked Kilty.
"Taking his wedding ring off," said Maureen.
Leslie sighed heavily.
"You all right, Leslie?" said Kilty.
"No," she said.
Kilty took Leslie's hand, squeezing it hard and holding on to it. Maureen could see it made Leslie uncomfortable but she didn't want to yank her hand away so she left it, glancing at it a couple of times, wishing Kilty would get off her. Eventually she had to offer her a fag to make her let go.
They watched the man press the bell. The door opened and they saw the bodybuilder inside, leaning against the wall, smiling and greeting the man with an outstretched hand.
"My stupid fucking father," whispered Kilty.
"He didn't know, Kilty," said Maureen. "He wouldn't have told us if he knew."
"Yeah." Leslie rubbed her back. "He didn't know."
"Piss off," said Kilty gently, knowing they were trying to be kind. "All it takes is a glance at the fucking newspapers. These poor women think they're coming here to study-"
"I think they know what they're coming here for," said Maureen.
Kilty seemed disappointed. "Why do you think that?"
"That's what Candy III said, really. She said they get their passports taken away and made to work for nothing."
Maureen could tell that Kilty had a problem with it. "But why would Ella fall out with her son about that, then?"
"Ella was a pro herself," said Maureen. "We might have trouble seeing how wrong that is but Ella wouldn't."
It was dark now and the grassy hills in the park had turned a velvet blue. The rusting iron gates leading into the park hung idly from their struts. Maureen thought of Ella's bitter son Si, furious at what his mother did for money, never thinking what she was giving up for him, never wondering at the resourcefulness it took to do that. Candy II wasn't bitter, and look at her life. She thought of bitter Una, sitting in her big house with a healthy baby and a brand-new car at her door. And she thought of herself and her past, of all the golden moments that had passed unappreciated because she was bitter too. The one thing they had in common was their victimhood, and that mantle was a negation of all the wonder in life, a license to brutalize without compunction. She wondered if she was using it to kill Michael, if it seemed inevitable simply because she wanted to do it so much. Back across the road, the light in the doorway flickered, and as Maureen looked up she imagined a school assembly lineup, with Si McGee and dead-eyed Tonsa sitting on a parquet floor next to Candy II, gleefully spitting mucus-covered Kinder-eggs over the floor towards a row of angry teachers.
Across the square the door opened and shut. The bodybuilder looked straight at them as he walked down the steps, and ran a slow, graceless jog over to them, swinging his overworked arms. He stopped in front of them and looked along the line as if he was memorizing their faces. Maureen nodded at him and went back to staring at the door. "What are you girls doing out here, then?" he said, sounding jolly and friendly.
Maureen jerked a thumb at the house behind her. "Locked out," she said.
He laughed, thinking it was a joke, and stopped when he saw that she wasn't joining in. "Come on," he said, reaching forward and cupping his hand under Leslie's elbow, lifting her, "time to go home."
Skinny as she was, Leslie turned on him. "Get your fucking hand off me," she spat, wringing her arm free and stepping back. She had her finger in his face, a stiff, angry finger, and she was shouting. "Do you own this street, do ye, eh?" She didn't give him time to answer. "Do ye own this fuck street and everyone in it, do ye? Your fucking street, is it?" She was close to hitting him, they could all tell. He backed off. "Calm down." He looked at Maureen for support.
"You fucker. You fucking fucker." Leslie was screaming at the top of her voice. Lights flicked on in front rooms around the quiet square. "You're running a fucking brothel over there. D'ye batter them if they won't work for ye? Do ye?"
The bodybuilder had been nice for long enough. He pressed his lips together. "Calm down," he said, telling her this time. He reached for her roughly, grabbing her arm, holding her tight. Kilty, seated three feet away, launched herself, landing mouth first on his wrist, biting him as hard as she could. Yelping, he let go of Leslie, who seemed to have grown two feet taller than any of the rest of them.
Her mouth was a thin, furious line, her voice low and hard. "The man's not born that can raise his hand to me," she said, and punched him on the side of the neck. They hardly saw her hand go out, just retract, heard the sound of skin slapping hard against skin, and the bodybuilder went down like a bag of bricks.
"What the fuck…" said Maureen.
"I'm afraid I've lost my temper," said Leslie, with supernatural calm. "Perhaps we should leave."
They were buzzing with nervous excitement as they queued to get into the all-night cafe.
"I enjoyed that," said Leslie, standing tall and proud, her eyes open a little too wide. "Can't we just go back to Maureen's?"
"No," snapped Kilty disapprovingly. "I think we should stay out until you've calmed down."
"Dunno why you're so snotty about it," said Leslie aggressively. "You bit him."
"I was defending you," said Kilty. "Anyway, there's no food in hers. I haven't eaten since yesterday." She poked Maureen hard in the ribs. "And you look like Bobby Sands."
"Give it a rest," said Maureen, and nodded at Leslie. "She's already had a go at me today."
It was a strange cafe, furnished with old school desks and a curvy bit of a church pew. Two avocado-colored baths took up valuable floor space and had plants growing in them for no good reason. It was kept busy with the waves of homebound pub-goers, clubbers and lost loners who just couldn't sleep. Kilty ordered a whole lot of things from cups of cocoa to eggs Benedict and they dutifully handed their menus back to the exhausted waitress.
"What was all that stuff?" asked Leslie.
"Calming food," said Kilty, getting a pink Powerpuff Girls notebook out of her handbag and flipping it open. "We need to calm down and think about what we're going to do about this."
"I don't want to calm down," said Leslie. "I enjoyed that."
Kilty took out a pen, clicked it open and wrote an elaborate "1" in the tiny margin. "We need to think. What are our goals here?"
"What d'ye mean?" Leslie asked.
"What are we going to try to achieve? It's better if we work that out before we come up with a plan." Then she explained, "Social work postgrad, course 101."
They saw the logic.
"I want to bring that bastard McGee down," said Maureen.
"I want to help the women in there," said Leslie reproachfully, and Maureen realized that she should have said that too.